Film shows bluesman Paul Butterfield as powerful pioneer

Bill Knight column for 3-28, 29 or 30, 2019

Enshrined in both the Blues and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Halls of Fame, blues harmonica player and bandleader Paul Butterfield played 1970’s Kickapoo Creek Music Festival in Central Illinois, 1969’s Woodstock Music Festival, 1967’s Monterey Festival, and 1965’s Newport Folk Festival.

Then, besides being a touchstone of the explosive emergence of blues in a rock/pop period, Butterfield also pioneered the modern racial integration of contemporary bands – and audiences.

Now, the 104-minute documentary “Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story” is scheduled for a free screening at 7 p.m. Friday, April 5 at the University of Illinois/Springfield’s Brookens Auditorium, about 60 miles from where Butterfield’s band played the Kickapoo gathering.

A sensitive, sometimes surly working-class guy from Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood on the city’s South Side, Butterfield didn’t back away from controversy. In fact, at Newport – where Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary pleaded for their booking – he wasn’t bothered by the few boos that greeted his electrified, amplified band backing headliner Bob Dylan.

The feature-length movie tracing Butterfield’s life and career was produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker John Anderson, whose work has ranged from music videos and concert films of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys to documentary journalism with Bill Kurtis. He skillfully blends interviews with friends and family with performance clips that offer a glimpse of Butterfield’s power and zeal.

Archival footage of Butterfield on stage is occasionally slick and often raw, comparable at times to his riveting “Mystery Train” from the Band’s “Last Waltz” live-concert video (and far better than the Rockpalast video of his first show in Europe, in 1978). Interspersed comments come from bandmates Elvin Bishop, Barry Goldberg, Sam Lay and David Sanborn, plus Chicago harmonica artists Corky Siegel and Charlie Musselwhite, musicians Bonnie Raitt and Al Kooper, producer Marshall Chess, and other recording artists including Maria Muldaur and Todd Rundgren.

            Each shares a reverence, even awe, about Butterfield, who learned the blues and the harmonica from talents at Chicago clubs like Muddy Waters and Little Walter, as well as countless hours practicing by Lake Michigan. But the youngster created his own style, one faithful to blues’ roots while also unconventional and innovative, a sound his son Lee describes as “a revival meeting the authentic.”

Butterfield’s group was “the edge of soul,” Siegel remarks, “the most powerful band I’ve ever heard,” and Chess adds, “once you heard Paul, you got easily pulled into it.”

Formed in 1963, when Butterfield lured drummer Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold from Howlin’ Wolf’s outfit, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band featured the rhythm section of Lay and Arnold, guitarists Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, and the keyboards of Mark Naftalin. Adding a hard-rock energy to Chicago blues, they helped launch a global appreciation of the blues to newer (whiter) audiences.

Also, integrated band were uncommon then, though in hindsight Lay says, “We happened to be black and white.” However, some venues were resistant. But with his abiding respect for the music and an irreverent brashness for much, Butterfield famously – even ferociously – stood up for what he believed in.

“We were an interracial band where everybody was equal, but there were parts of the country that didn’t see it that way,” remembers guitarist Buzz Feiten. “People would say something to us and there were some near-confrontations with Butterfield because he would get in their face.”

Butterfield explained to a black band member, “Where you can’t go, we won’t go.”

Such attitudes created shared enthusiasm, even loyalty, by musicians (Bloomfield declined to tour with Dylan to stay with Butterfield), and Butterfield’s groups produced an impressive discography, from his seminal 1965 debut record through his “Better Days” period in upstate New York and his 1980s career revival to extraordinary live sets highlighted by “Fathers and Sons,” a double-LP featuring Butterfield bandmate plus Muddy Waters, Otis Spann and other older bluesmen.

Suffering from peritonitis, a chronic abdominal disorder, Butterfield also abused drugs and alcohol, and often performed “like it was the last time,” it’s said. He stole the show at an April 1987 concert in Las Vegas alongside B.B. King, Albert King, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn and others, and died a few weeks later at the age of 44.

In his life, Butterfield was “a force of Nature,” says Sanborn, his sax player for five years. “It was my introduction to the idea that it’s better to reach for something and miss it than just to hold back and play it safe.”

A big-screen viewing is recommended, and digital and home-video releases aren’t scheduled, so try not to reach for this memorable movie.

Proposed budget is a ‘bomb cyclone’

Bill Knight column for 3-25, 26 or 27, 2019

When I read the “Budget for a Better America” President Trump released March 11, I felt my face flush and seemed to hear my late mom say, “Billy, calm down. You’ll have a conniption fit.”

One of her favorite warnings from her childhood in Kentucky, where folks used “conniption” to mean panic, the term can be as old-fashioned as other phrases are new-fangled, like “bomb cyclone,” that weather condition where air pressure drops so dramatically the storm becomes as strong as a hurricane.

Trump’s budget is a storm of sorts, and it’s taken weeks to calm down.

Federal budget proposals are political and moral documents, said the Rev. Adam Taylor of Sojourners.

“They signal what and who we prioritize and seek to protect or uplift,” he said. “As Christians we can disagree on many issues, but it should be hard to argue that there is an overriding call in the Bible to prioritize the welfare of the vulnerable. This is the moral test. Based on this test, the Trump administration’s proposed budget priorities for Fiscal Year 2020 fail miserably.”

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said, “His plan is simple: Force us to get by with less, so corporations can hoard even more. [Trump’s] budget does more harm than I can list.”

But others can.

“The budget seeks to cut non-defense discretionary spending by 9%, or $54 billion,” said Catholic Charities.

Trump wants to cut Agriculture 14.9%, Education 12%, Energy 10.8%, Health and Human Services 11.9%, Interior 10.9%, Justice 2.3%, Labor 9.7%, State 23.3%, and Transportation 21.5%.

“For the third straight year, a majority of American farmers and ranchers are expected to lose money farming,” said National Farmer Union president Roger Johnson.

The proposal also would cut SNAP food stamps $220 billion over 10 years (hitting rural America the hardest) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) $1 billion, and the Environmental Protection Agency $2.5 billion, Catholic Charities said, plus the Army Corps of Engineers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and assistance to worldwide AIDS programs.

Maybe most troubling are proposed cuts for 10 years to Medicaid ($1.5 trillion) and Medicare ($845 billion). That contradicts Trump’s repeated promises to safeguard Medicare and runs counter to the administration’s power over Medicaid since states can’t be forced to accept it as a state-administered program financed by block grants, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar concedes.

“Hospitals are less and less able to cover the cost of care for Medicare patients,” said Chip Kahn of the Federation of American Hospitals. “It is no time to gut Medicare.”

There are increases, notably the Pentagon, rising 4.7% from $716 billion this year to $750 billion (meaning Defense would get $6 out of every $10 in discretionary spending). Other hikes would fund a “U.S. Space Force” and benefit both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The justification for the cuts is to reduce government’s annual budget deficit, but another option would be to increase taxes, which are as low as they’ve been in decades for the richest 1%.

“The only place to find deficit reduction then, if cutting defense spending or raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations is off the table, is to decimate the social safety net – already [at] a historically low level,” Taylor added.

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), chair of the House Budget Committee, said, “President Trump added nearly $2 trillion to our deficits with tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations, and now it appears his budget asks the American people to pay the price. With severe cuts to essential programs and services that would leave our nation less safe and secure, the Trump budget is as dangerous as it is predictable.”

It also pushes privatization, from federally built dams (that sell low-cost power to mostly rural consumers) to education (making taxpayers underwrite private, religious and home schools), and panders to his radical Right base and corporate cronies. (It would extend permanently the 2017 tax cuts to the top 1%).

Trump’s budget is probably doomed on Capitol Hill. Democrats are the House majority, and though pro-Trump Republicans dominate the GOP, which controls the Senate, Trump will need 60 senators to get items through, not 51. The GOP has 53 Senate seats.

Nevertheless, the storm is upon us.

“Trump’s intentions are clear,” said Lindsay Koshgarian and Ashik Siddique of the National Priorities Project, “and if his recent willingness to shut down the federal government is any indication, there are plenty of fights ahead.”

So: Seek shelter, but don’t panic. Persevere.

Shutdown victims remind us of unions’ value

Bill Knight column for 3-21, 22 or 23, 2019

Before disgraced attorney Michael Cohen told Congress that President Donald Trump was a cheat, journalists exposed how the real-estate developer for years had treated his workers and contractors: badly.

Infamous for funny business in fully paying those who worked on his projects, Trump seems to have carried a grifter’s management style into his administration.

About 800,000 federal employees were hurt by the 35-day holiday shutdown, reports the AFL-CIO, which says the record-breaking disruption continues to hurt working people months after the shutdown ended.

“To make matters worse, more than 1 million federal contractors lost a month of paychecks during the lockout and, unless Congress acts, they will never receive that pay,” the labor federation said.

Trump opposed any deal ending the shutdown if it included back pay for federal contractors forced to work without pay or sent home during the shutdown. So, the 1,768-page deal putting federal employees back to work didn’t include paying federal contractors or their workers.

 “Just in case you need more evidence that Donald Trump doesn’t care about American workers, he views giving back pay to federal contractors like custodians and food-service workers as a deal-breaker,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “This is egregious – especially since he is the reason they didn’t get paid.”

Unfortunately, many contract workers aren’t unionized, so they have little recourse to address this grievance. Their only hope is the Fairness for Federal Contractors Act of 2019 introduced by U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ). It would provide back pay for federal contract workers affected by the shutdown, but its chances in the Republican-controlled Senate are slim.

Had those contract workers been unionized, their collective-bargaining agreements would have had mechanisms to enforce provisions of their labor contracts. Indeed, federal workers in more than a dozen unions – such as the American Federation of Government Employees, the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, and the National Treasury Employees Union – had some protection. Further, they and all unions negotiate to fight wage stagnation, income inequality, working conditions and benefits by organizing on the job and in society in general.

Unions’ importance has been neglected or forgotten, and only crises such as the shutdown remind us.

Economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff in 1979 argued that “by providing workers with a voice both at the workplace and in the political arena, unions can and do affect positively the functioning of the economic and social systems.”

Their report, “The Two Faces of Unionism,” showed data confirming that organized labor had:

* reduced the country’s overall wage inequality despite economics books that cautioned about unions’ power;

* cut labor-force turnover, lowering employers’ costs tied to recruiting, training and retaining workers;

* decreased pay disparities based on race; and

* engaged in political activity that benefitted the nations’ working class, unionized or not.

Now, 40 years later, other economists are rediscovering organized labor’s value. Unions for decades have been vital for the working and middle classes, according to a May 2018 paper by economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu.

That National Bureau of Economic Research study – “Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data” – uses some 70 years of statistics on union-organizing rates as long ago as 1936, the year after Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act legalizing and empowering private-sector workers to unionize. As unionization goes up, inequality tends to go down (and vice versa), the authors showed.

“Given the contrast between the Golden Age of 1940-1970 and the current age of spiraling inequality, wouldn’t it make sense to bring unions back?” asked Noah Smith, a Stony Brook University finance professor who now writes for Bloomberg View. “It might be worth it.”

The political climate has contributed to weakening for unions and worsening inequality. Government policies and practices such as appointing anti-union ideologues to regulatory agencies, supporting commercial globalization, and enacting Right to Work laws all damaged workers’ influence.

“Supporters of free markets should rethink their antipathy to unions,” Smith wrote. “Other than massive government redistribution of income and wealth, there’s really no other obvious way to address the country’s rising inequality. Also, unions might be an effective remedy for the problem of increasing corporate market power – evidence suggests that when unionization rates are high, industry concentration is less effective at suppressing wages. Repealing Right to Work laws and appointing more pro-union regulators could be just the medicine the economy needs.”

Meanwhile, employers who are federal contractors as well as their workers might consider unionization as a tool to use with future government agreements.